There Is Always More than What We Perceive

There Is Always More than What We Perceive explored the ways in which contemporary black queer artists in Toronto engage issues of identity, race, sexuality, gender, and space. The selected artists—Michèle Pearson Clarke, Abdi Osman, and Natalie Wood— challenged the monolingual voice of black studies set by patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. Their representations of black queer diasporic subjects present identities that exist in the interstices between normalized social categories. This exhibition project contributed to the decentralization of monolithic blackness and LGBTQ identity by asking: “Whose blackness? Whose queerness?” These queries were twofold; first they acknowledged the need to recognize the plurality of the black experience across geographical locations, and secondly, they cautioned viewers against black or queer universalism. The exhibition There Is Always More than What We Perceive rendered visible multiple intersections of personhood in order to enrich and expand discussions about blackness in Canada.